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Did Red Dead Redemption 2 Downgrade Their Graphics With Their Latest Patch?

Rockstar’s latest and quite possibly greatest endeavor was the sequel to their wild west open world game, Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption took the PlayStation and Xbox to their absolute limits of capability with how intense the graphics were. A recent patch might have changed that, however. Did update 1.06 downgrade the Red Dead Redemption 2 graphics?

Here’s an image captured by an eagle eye’ed viewer which depicts the difference in the game before and after the patch.

Now it might not be easy to spot at first but if you look closely, you’ll see the difference in lighting. Rockstar has seemingly removed Ambient Occlusion from the Red Dead Redemption 2 graphics. Whether this was a bug or intentional patch by the company isn’t confirmed.

Red Dead Redemptions 2 graphics settings aren’t available to be changed manually by the players sadly. How the game looks is completely up to Rockstar and these patches. This might change soon enough if the PC port rumors are true.

The community is together in believing that the downgrade in graphics for the game was made to help it run better in both multiplayer and single-player. What was the emphasis more on?

It’s not a coincidence that this patch came out after the full-fledged Red Dead Online was put up for everybody to play, Rockstar is also aiming for the live service model and I’m pretty sure people value performance over quality in most case scenarios.

Is this really the smartest thing for Rockstar to do though? Pursuing the live service model? First off, this is assuming this change was deliberately made. Secondly, perhaps they’re doing it to retain users that are done with the story to experience more optimized multiplayer.